


January Angst Prompts

by NKMLN



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Hella angst y'all, Human AU, Inspired by Music, Inspired by Poetry, M/M, Pre-Episode: Accepting Anxiety, University AU, Very mild body horror, blind!logan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-23 16:05:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17686655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NKMLN/pseuds/NKMLN
Summary: Exactly what it says on the can.





	1. Logicality, "I won't hurt you."

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is https://stella-scriptor.tumblr.com/

_The stars are vast and deep through the frost-laced window. Logan can hear the fire crackle as he looks up at them, can feel it warm him through his skin. Patton sits next to him, head resting lazily on his shoulder as he flips through a book. “Logan?”_

_Logan turns, and Patton kisses him gently, leaning up to reach him. “Love you,” Patton says sweetly as he pulls away._

_And Logan means to reply, but suddenly there’s no more air in his chest. He breathes, and nothing happens. He chokes. He coughs. Patton doesn’t look over, just smiles and goes back to his book. His chest rises, falls. The fire keeps crackling. He’s suffocating. There’s no air. There’s… There’s_ …

“Logan!”

Logan gasps as he opens his eyes, Patton leaning over him on the couch. He cringes back involuntarily, catching his breath. “Logan?” Patton asks in concern. “Are you alright?”

He doesn’t reply. Patton puts a gentle hand on his shoulder, and he flinches back, sitting up. He keeps his eyes down, so he doesn’t see Patton’s face.

“Lo, I’m not going to-“

“I’m going upstairs,” Logan tells him quickly, putting on his glasses. “Thank you for waking me up.”

He doesn’t look back on his way up the stairs, just breathes, and breathes, and pretends he needs to.


	2. Platonic LAMP, "You look like hell."

It’s ten, when Patton gets back to the apartment. Virgil and Roman are at the kitchen table, going over a piece of psychology homework with Logan, but Roman looks up when the door closes. “Pat, hey! How was the movie?”

Patton hums noncommitally, facing the wall to hang up his coat. “We, uh… we didn’t go to the movies, actually.”

Logan looks up now, too. “Oh?”

Patton sniffles, and Logan sees him brace his shoulders before he turns around. His eyes are red, and there’s a long, thin scratch down the side of his face.

This might be fine if he’d been playing with a cat, but for someone getting home from a first date, it’s not ideal.

“Patton,” Virgil says slowly, “No offense, but you look like  _hell_.”

Patton sniffles again and forces a weak smile. “So, as it turns out, his ex was… not a great person? And she, um, kind of freaked out when she saw him with someone else, so she attacked him! With a plastic knife, in the parking lot! And I tried to stop her, and she, um…” He rubs his hand under his eyes and sighs, breath catching. “So he drove me back here, and that was it! That was the date!”

Patton smiles again, and breaks into a sob.

Roman pushes out from the table and scoops him off his feet in one long, fluid motion. “My dear sir, you have been robbed of an evening!” He maneuvers Patton until he’s holding him bridal style. “That can’t stand, can it?”

Patton lays his face against Roman’s chest. Roman frowns sympathetically. “Okay, brains are cancelled tonight. We’re putting on a movie.”

“Oh, thank god,” Logan murmurs, closing the textbook. “Finally, something mindless.”

Virgil gasps from his side. “Was that a  _pun_?”

“No- no-!”

“Hey, Pat, Logan made a pun!”

Patton’s thin laughter echoes from the living room.


	3. Prinxiety, "I don't need to be protected."

“I’m doing this for you,” Anxiety whispers. Roman thinks he might almost believe it. “I’m doing this to protect you, okay?”

“I don’t need to be protected,” Roman hisses back. “We don’t need you. You get that, right? None of us need you!”

“You wanna bet?” Anxiety asks him. “You wouldn’t last a day without me, and you know it.“

“We went thirteen years of our life without you, and we did  _just_  fine. You shouldn’t exist. We don’t need you. We never have.” Roman’s thoughts are on fire and his words are bitter cold. He’s spitting steam into the space between the two of them. “Why don’t you just go away? You’d finally do something useful for once in your life!”

Anxiety’s eyes gleam under his hood. “Fine,” he says simply. “Fine. I will, if that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

Anxiety smiles, sharp, thin, and slams his bedroom door.

Nothing ever comes out again.


	4. Platonic Anxceit, "You look like hell."

It’s like snow: beautiful and shimmering and calm, until the moment your car slides out of control on a backroad. Spoiler alert: you freeze to death while awaiting rescue.

So the first scale doesn’t hurt. Neither does the second, or the third, or the fourth. It doesn’t hurt until he’s stopped counting and accepted the dull, itching ache as an inescapable facet of his life.

“Dee, are you in there?”

“No,” Deceit calls back through the door. “You can’t come in.”

Anxiety, of course, does come in. “Dude, I haven’t seen you in d- What happened to your face?”

Dee stares at him from under the brim of his bowler hat, ferociously yellow scales glinting in the light. “It grew like that.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.” Anxiety closes the door behind him and sits next to Deceit on his bed. “You look like hell! What did you do, just shut yourself up in here when this started?”

“No.”

Anxiety sighs, scrunching up his eyes. “You idiot. Dee, don’t those hurt?”

“They’re alright,” Deceit tells him. It’s a halfway truth. (Spoiler alert: he’s just lying.)

“Bullshit.” Anxiety pulls Deceit closer to him. “The skin’s all red- do you want me to help? I could- I don’t know, I could try to pick them off if you think they won’t grow back.”

“That’s a great idea,” Deceit tells him, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Because I haven’t tried that or anything.”

Anxiety runs a hand through his hair. “Okay, I’ll go see if I can find anything for this. Hang tight.” He squeezes Deceiet shoulder and exits the room just as quietly as he came in.

Deceit sits up and looks at himself in the mirror across the room. His scales gleam, foreign on his skin. In his skin. Whatever. He blinks, and watches his two brown eyes blink back at him. At least they’ve stopped spreading, right? At least it’s done, right?

(Spoiler alert: it's not.)


	5. Platonic Moxiety, "Please don't hide from me."

“Virgil?”

The knock comes at his door again, soft and hesitant. “Kiddo, it’s okay, I know it was an accident. We got all the glass put away. Everybody’s alright.”

Virgil’s foot is bleeding into the sink. Not much, but it’s staining the porcelain red. He very carefully pulls out the chip of glass lodged in it from the bowl he dropped on the kitchen floor, dropping it on the vanity next to him. It’s fine. It’s going to be fine.

That knock again. He grits his teeth. “Virgil?” Patton asks softly. “You’re not in trouble, kiddo, I-“ There’s a beat. “Please don’t hide from me,” Patton murmurs weakly.

He’s not hiding. He’s just…

Virgil turns on the water, and doesn’t listen as he leaves.


	6. Logicality, "Why can't I hurt you?"

 

Logan is exhausted. No, he’s beyond exhausted- he’s slipping into the realm of the sort of sleep deprivation that government agencies are known to use as a form of torture. His head pounds. His vision swims, the sharpie poem on his arm going fuzzy. “’And I do this to myself,’” Logan murmurs, reading aloud in an attempt to ground himself.

“Hm?”

And then there’s the other form of torture: Patton Bright.

Patton, that insufferable, insufferably cute boy from across the aisle in their organic chemistry class. Patton, who is either the biggest suck-up Logan has ever laid eyes on, or entirely and sickeningly genuine. Patton, who has steadfastly ignored every single one of Logan’s increasingly obvious hints that he doesn’t want to befriend or interact with his classmates.

Patton, who has somehow (somehow, somehow) wandered his way to Logan’s table at the library. Logan shakes his head and goes back to his laptop. “Nothing,” he mutters.

“Are you alright?” Patton asks, blinking in the dim fluorescent light, eyes barely visible behind the reflection on his glasses.

Logan hardly glances up from his laptop. “Actually, I’m a little busy, Bright.”

Patton’s quiet for a moment, and then Logan hears him stand and leave.  _Finally_. It only took him, what, an hour? Half a semester? Long enough, in either case. Logan sighs in relief and goes back to his paper.

~|~

Half an hour later, Logan’s finishing up the last of his citations on this godforsaken paper. If a desk job is hell, purgatory is some sort of college: probably worth it in the end, but absolute horror to attempt.

He looks up to see Patton settle back down at the table, holding a tray occupied by two paper cups of coffee. He takes one out and puts it on Logan’s side before practically inhaling his own.

Logan stares at the cup for a moment, dull, uncomprehending, before finally asking, “Why do you do this?”

Patton looks up quizzically. “Why are you like this? I mean- Patton, I’ve interacted with you, like, four times this whole semester, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m-”

“Kind of rude?”

Logan stares, and Patton smiles down at his cup. “Yeah, I noticed. We’re all in the same boat, y’know? I don’t hold it against anyone.” He takes another sip, speaking quickly. “I mean, we’re not two-dimensional. The guy in the room next to me is hiding a duck from his RA. My roommate watches Parks and Rec with his girlfriend every Tuesday night. You write stuff on your arms when there’s a perfectly good computer right in front of you. I just focus on the little stuff, and then everyone becomes a little more bearable.”

Logan blinks. “Oh.” Patton doesn’t look up at him. “Thank you,” he says softly. It feels small, next to what his classmate’s just put into the air.

Patton nods, reopening his computer, but he doesn’t meet Logan’s eyes. “Of course,” he murmurs, like he doesn’t understand what he’s just said. Like it’s nothing at all.

Logan wonders, for a moment, what crashing satellites he’s never thought to consider are hiding in this boys mind.

~|~

_And I think, “Wow._

_It must be exhausting to want to live this much.”_


	7. Romantic Logince, "Please don't hide from me," and "Forget me."

It’s almost eleven when Roman realizes he’s left his jacket behind from rehearsal, and it’s eleven eight when he finally makes it across campus to the theatre. It’s eleven nine when his cold, almost numb fingers unlock the door that leads backstage.

The lights are off, and he doesn’t bother to switch them on. He brushes past the costume rack and towards his sound technician booth, but he freezes with his foot on the bottom step when something pierces the silence.

It’s eleven ten. Someone is playing the piano.

He doesn’t recognize the song, but it’s slow, gentle. Someone is singing along, very, very quietly, and he can’t quite make out the words until he creeps closer.

“ _All the light that you possess is skewed by lakes and seas. / The shattered surface, so imperfect, is all that you believe._ ” The singer’s voice is clear, a veritable storm in the darkness. Roman doesn’t move from his new hiding spot, just listens silently, jacket all but forgotten.

“I-” Their voice cracks, and the music cuts out. “Shit,” the player murmurs. Roman hears them sigh, and then a cacophony of notes, like they’ve just slammed their hand onto the keyboard. “Shit,” they say again, and Roman hears something thick and choking in their voice. They take a deep breath, and Roman hears them close the lid of the piano.

Roman takes a step back, behind the curtain, and hears the floor underneath him creak. He holds his breath.

“Oh, shit,” he hears the player mutter. He hears them move quickly offstage, their shoes tap, tap, tapping across the floor into the other wing, and then, after a few more moments, he hears the back door open and close.

And that’s it. They’re gone.

~|~

Roman comes back the next night. The song is different, faster, darker. He creeps closer this time, in the pitch black, onto the stage. He still can’t see the player, but he can hear him far more clearly, hear the tremble in his voice when they sing, the harshness of their breath between the lyrics.

“ _He stumbled into faith and thought / God this is all there is / The pictures in his mind arose / And began to breathe. / And no one saw and no one heard / They just followed lead.”_ Roman hears their voice swell, louder, more jagged as they continue. “ _The pictures in his mind awoke / And began to breed._ ”

Roman keeps listening, hears how they turn the song from it’s original image to a picture of grief, of loss, of pain, pain, pain. The music evolves to the perfect definition of sorrow, hanging in the darkness like a spell.

It ends, finally, and Roman hears them breathe in deep. “Are you there?” they ask after a moment. “If you are, don’t come back again.”

“Why?” Roman asks before he can stop himself. “You’re really good, I’d like to-”

“Please forget me.”

“I can’t do that.”

Roman hears them stand and leave again, without responding.

~|~

They don’t come back the next night, or the one after that. Roman checks.

~|~

A month later, Roman comes in late again. He’s got a reason other than curiosity this time- he’s left his jacket behind again.

The lights are on this time. There’s someone at the piano, playing gently, and in the light, Roman can see a white cane leaning against the bench.

He stops playing when Roman steps onstage, but he doesn’t turn around. “I thought you wouldn’t come back,” he says carefully.

“I thought you were gone, too,” Roman replies.

“I just wanted to make sure nobody was listening to me.”

“Why?”

The man does turn around, then, and Roman sees his face- it’s been perfectly tuned to lose all expression. His eyes are dark blue, which isn’t important, but Roman notices it anyway. “I can’t see the keys anymore, okay? I’m still trying to figure this out, and I didn’t want anyone to-” He takes a deep breath, crossing his arms over his chest. “I didn’t want anyone to hear.”

“You’re really good, I promise.”

The man turns back to the piano. “I was better, though.”

Roman hesitates, then walks closer. “Did you teach yourself to play those other songs?”

The man shakes his head. “I learned them before this got too bad. They’re in the muscle memory, now. It helps me figure out where all the keys are if I use ones I already know for sure.”

Roman glances at him. “Do you know Heart and Soul?”

The man nods. “Of course.” He tilts his head to the side, a smile flickering at the edges of his mouth. “Is that an offer?”

Roman laughs at that, just a little, and sits down beside him. The man makes room for him on the bench. “My name’s Roman,” he offers, placing his fingers on the keys.

“Logan,” the man tells him, doing the same. “Shall we?”

Roman smiles, and they begin.


End file.
